With all the technological advancements made by humans, it may seem that we have lost touch with nature – but not everyone. People in some parts of Africa use a more effective guide than any GPS system when it comes to finding honeybees and honey. This is not an electronic device, but a bird.
The Greater Honeyguide – The GPS Guide to Honey
The greater honeyguide (a very fitting name), scientifically known as Indicator indicator (a more fitting scientific name), knows where all the beehives are because it eats beeswax. The Hadza people in Tanzania and the Yao people in Mozambique have long understood this. Honey hunters from the Hadza and Yao have formed a unique relationship with this bird species by making distinctive calls, and the greater honeyguide responds with its own calls, leading them to a beehive.
Response to Human Calls
Due to the differences in the calls of the Hadza and Yao, animal scientist Claire Spottiswoode from the University of Cambridge and anthropologist Brian Wood from the University of California, Los Angeles wanted to find out if the birds generally respond to human calls or if they are tuned to local humans. They found that the birds were much more likely to respond to the local call, indicating that they had learned to recognize this call.
Collaboration Between Birds and Humans
To determine which sounds were most effective in attracting the greater honeyguide to cooperate with humans, Spottiswoode and Wood played three recordings, starting with the local call. The Yao honeyguide call is described as a “loud whistle followed by a roar (brrrr-hm),” while the Hadza call is more of a “musical whistle,” as they stated in a recently published study in Science. The second recording would be the foreign call, which would be the Yao call in Hadza territory and vice versa.
The third recording was an unrelated human sound intended to test whether the human voice alone was enough for the greater honeyguide to follow. Since the Hadza and Yao sounds are similar, the researchers alternated between recordings of honey hunters saying a few words like their names.
The Impact of Cultural Diversity on Calls to the Greater Honeyguide
There is a good reason why honey hunters in the Hadza and Yao told Wood and Spottiswoode that they have not changed their calls and never will. If they did, they are unlikely to gather much honey. How did this interspecies communication develop? Why do the types of calls differ? Researchers do not believe these calls originated randomly.
Both the Hadza and Yao have their unique languages, and sounds from both of them have been incorporated into their calls. But there is more to it. The Hadza often hunt animals when looking for honey. So, the Hadza do not want their calls recognized as human; otherwise, the prey they are tracking may feel threatened and flee. This may be why they use whistles to communicate with the greater honeyguide – by sounding like birds, they can attract the honeyguide and track their prey undetected.
In contrast, the Yao do not hunt mammals and primarily rely on agriculture and fishing for food. This, along with the fact that they try to avoid dangerous creatures like lions, hyenas, and elephants, may explain why they use recognizable human acoustics to call the greater honeyguide. These human sounds may scare off those animals, allowing Yao honey hunters to search for honey safely with their honeyguide partners. These findings show that cultural diversity has a significant impact on the calls to the greater honeyguide.
Communication
Between the Species
Although animals may not literally speak our language, the greater honeyguide is just one of many species that has its own way of communicating with us. They can even learn our cultural traditions.
“Cultural traditions of consistent behavior are prevalent in non-human animals and can mediate other forms of cooperation between species,” the researchers said in the same study.
The greater honeyguide begins to guide humans as soon as it starts flying, and this ability, along with learning to respond to traditional calls and collaborating with honey hunters, works well for both humans and the bird. They might be (in some way) speaking our language.
Source: https://arstechnica.com/science/2023/12/this-bird-is-like-a-gps-for-honey/?comments=1
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